Brian Toohey ( outstanding truth-telling Australian journalist, especially re Intelligence abuses ) on Australian Intelligence subversion of Australian media (2019): “Today’s generation of journalists have a much tougher job. Governments have introduced new laws making it a criminal offence to receive a wide range of information. The June 2018 Espionage Act provides a glimpse of the future where it will be an offence to receive “Information of any kind, whether true or false and whether in a material form or not, and includes (a) an opinion; and (b) a report of a conversation”. George Orwell could never have dreamt that one up [page xv]…
After Peter Barbour took over from {ASIO chief Charles] Spry in 1970, he tried to introduce reforms but was often frustrated by senior officers from the Spry era , some of whom were strongly influenced by [B.A. ”Bob”] Santamaria [traitorous and neofascist Catholic Right “asset” (spy) of the Americans who was a key figure in the National Civic Council and the Democratic Labor Party and who was a major figure in keeping Labor out of power from 1950-1972]. John Blaxland’s chapter called “Shaping and influencing” in the second volume of the ASIO [Australian Security and Intelligence Organization] history gives details of operations conducted by a new Special Projects Section established in 1965 to influence the debate over the Vietnam War. Its head, Bob Swan, said those “spoiling operations” were initially “designed primarily to debunk, discredit, disillusion or destroy” the Communist Party and later extended to the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, which merely exercised the democratic right to oppose government policy. ASIO’s attempt’s to damage the government’s critics went far beyond its charter. It made extensive use of journalistic stooges in major media outlets who would put their name on material prepared by ASIO. One journalist, Robert Mayne, later revealed details of this activity in the National Times. For many years during the this period the ABC [the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the taxpayer-funded Australian equivalent of the mendacious UK BBC] and the Melbourne Age [leading Fairfax-owned centrist newspaper] let ASIO vet journalists to weed out people who might be regarded as subversive” [page 12]…
The [joint media organisations] submission [to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security] quoted the [Espionage and Foreign Interference] bill as saying it could apply to the release and reception of “Information of any kind, whether true or false and whether in a material form or not, and includes (a) an opinion; and (b) a report of a conversation”. When the amended bill became law, it retained this catch-all clause. The bill also made it an offence to leak, receive or publish “inherently harmful information” and that the prosecution does not have to prove it is national security classified information” [pages 232-233] (Brian Toohey, “Secret. The making of Australia’s security state”, Melbourne University Press, 2019).